


Going Down In Flames

by icountcards



Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Fluff, Friendship, Gen, despite the title nothing is actually on fire here, literally just an excuse for more of Mac being a good bro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-02-29 19:50:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18785035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icountcards/pseuds/icountcards
Summary: Riley throws herself into work after her breakup. Mac just wants to make sure she doesn't burn out.





	Going Down In Flames

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt "Favorite friendships" for Macgyver May. I honestly can't pick a favorite friendship, but 3x21 left me in the mood for more of Riley and Mac. Set before the finale because I haven't seen it yet.
> 
> (Title is stolen from the 3 Doors Down song of the same name, which was my main post-breakup tune when I went through a nasty split several years ago.)

It’s still dark when Mac gets to the Phoenix, early enough he’ll have the lab to himself for a couple hours to puzzle over the fragments of exploded car waiting for him. Instinctively, he moves silently through the empty hallways, although there’s no one to disturb. 

At least, there shouldn’t be. He freezes as he turns the corner toward the lab and spots the glow of a computer screen in what should be a dark room. He approaches cautiously, bracing himself to reverse course and sound the alarm for an intruder—but it’s only Riley, hunched in front of her computer at one of the tables. She’s asleep, head tucked down against her chest and hands still on the keyboard, and for a second Mac considers letting her sleep, but there’s no way that can be comfortable. She doesn’t stir at the sound of the door opening and closing, and Mac circles around to stand across the table from her. “Hey, Riley?” he says softly.

Her eyes blink open slowly, then fly wide as she registers where she is. “Sorry,” she says, shaking herself and running a hand through her hair. 

Mac frowns. “You should go home,” he says. She’d already been burning the candle at both ends trying to pin down the source of their leak, and in the past week—since she and Billy split—she’s gone ahead and just tossed the whole candle in the fire. 

Somebody’s got to keep an eye out and make sure she doesn’t burn down to ash. 

“You’re still here,” she says, narrowing her eyes at him and grabbing for the coffee in his hand.

He holds it out of her reach. “Already here,” he corrects, sizing her up. She’s still wearing yesterday’s outfit, which is, itself, a remix of her clothes from the day before and clothes he recognizes from her stashed bag. “When was the last time you went home?” 

Her brow furrows, her jaw clenching. “I don’t want to go home,” she says. “I need to find who leaked our information before something worse than a night in jail comes out of it.”

“You can’t do that if you run yourself into the ground,” he counters. And he gets it, he does, it’s got to be easier for her to bury herself in work than risk being alone with her thoughts right now, but with Jack gone, someone has to look out for her. 

She stares at the screen in front of her, unfocused, and sighs heavily. “It’s too quiet,” she says after a long moment, and Mac knows she doesn’t mean the lab. “I can’t…” she trails off and shakes her head, wincing. “I go home, I can’t sleep, I might as well be here and doing something useful, you know?” 

“You need rest,” he says, watching the way she folds in on herself behind the screen, like if she just shrinks down small enough there’ll be no room left for the aimless, lost feeling she’s been carrying around like a dark cloud. 

She eyes him warily. “I’m fine, I don’t want to—”

“You don’t have to go home,” he interrupts, already rummaging through cabinets in search of the spare cloth dust covers for some of Bozer’s larger projects. He snags those, along with a handful of zip ties and a failed bulletproof jacket prototype that’s been shoved to the bottom of a drawer, before sizing up the lab for a suitable place for his undertaking. 

“What are you doing?” Riley asks, standing up and leaning over to look at where he’s set up between a desk and the wall, twisting two of the dust covers into something resembling rope. 

“You’ll see in a second,” he says before sacrificing his belt to his construction. “Hey, can I borrow your belt for this?”

She gives him a suspicious look, but she donates her belt to the cause. “I’d better get this back,” she says.

“Don’t worry, I’m not doing anything irreversible with it,” he says as he checks the zip ties on his creation and adds the borrowed belt before stepping aside. “Ta-da.”

A tired grin reluctantly creeps across Riley’s face when she sees the hammock he’s built for her. “I told you, I’m fine,” she says, although the reassurance is somewhat ruined by the fact that she yawns widely a second later. 

“Just rest,” he says, stepping away from his construction and toward his own ongoing enigma of burned pieces. 

Riley frowns as she climbs into the hammock and settles in. “I’m not tired,” she lies.

“That’s fine,” Mac says. “You can help me try to make sense out of this, take a break from tracking the hacker.” It’s too quiet, she said. He can provide background noise.

“I can do that,” she says, shuffling around and swaying slightly. “Thanks for the bed.” 

Mac smiles. “No problem,” he says, turning his attention to the table covered in what’s left of his dad’s car in front of him. “Now, what is a problem is, this explosive destroyed almost every trace of itself and a good portion of the car.” Riley hums a vague acknowledgement, so he continues, although he’s not really expecting a meaningful response. “So we’re left trying to build an understanding of the bomb from what’s left, what happened to the pieces of the car, how far and what direction it threw all the debris…” he trails off and turns around to wake the computer with the diagram of where the parts in front of him had fallen.

“’s like archaeology,” Riley mumbles, although she skips about half the syllables in ‘archaeology’, like they’re just too much effort to say. 

“Yeah, kinda,” he agrees. “Just with more explosives and less dirt.” 

Riley says something that sounds vaguely like “unexploded ordnance,” but she’s already almost asleep again, so Mac lowers his voice to just above a whisper as he continues working and only tapers off completely when she’s definitely asleep, snoring softly on the other side of the room. He’s still puzzling over the fragments when Bozer arrives a couple hours later. 

“Hey, Mac, you get anywhere with the—” Mac puts a finger to his lips, and Bozer cuts himself off mid-sentence, looking baffled until Mac points to Riley, still fast asleep and curled in on herself as much as the hammock allows. Bozer nods his understanding and crosses the room. “She spent the night here again?” he whispers.

Mac nods. “I owe you some dust covers,” he says quietly, gesturing to his construction. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Bozer says, shaking his head. “She needs them more than I do.” 

Before long, in a minute or an hour, something will inevitably come up that needs their immediate attention, but right now, it’s calm, despite the unsolved problems on the table in front of him and hanging uneasily in the air. And maybe Jack’s gone, and left behind bigger shoes than Mac can fill, but he’s looking out for Riley the only way he knows how. And maybe, just maybe, that will be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Edit to add a fun fact that I forgot to include here at first: sometimes archaeologists really do come across unexploded ordnance, generally in the course of work near military testing or disposal areas, so, as Riley's trying to tell Mac, the job's not quite explosive-free. Still much more dirt involved though.


End file.
